The S-Series, looking at words that may or may not have an s at the end, has been on something of a hiatus since February’s look at anyway(s). Today, let’s move the series forward by looking at backward and backwards. As with anyways, the OED reports that backwards is the adverbial genitive form of its “base” form backward, which is sort of a useless fact for me to point out without going into a bit of detail on what an adverbial genitive is.

The genitive is a grammatical case in English better known as the possessive case. If you were to write, for instance, “the child’s toy”, child is in the genitive/possessive case, and this is marked by the presence of the apostrophe-s at the end. Both in English and in other languages, the genitive case is bit broader than mere possession, which is why I call it by this more obscure name.* One of the additional purposes of the genitive in English — well, moreso in Old/Middle English — is to convert nouns and adjectives to adverbs.

In Old and Middle English, this was a productive system, and that created a variety of common Modern English adverbs, such as once (from one), whence (from when), or sideways (from side and way). As English has become less of a case-marking language, the productivity of this system has mostly been lost. The only remaining productive form of it that I’m aware of (and honestly, I wouldn’t have thought of this if it hadn’t been discussed in the Wikipedia article) is for habitual events recurring at specified times:

Backwards is similarly an adverbial form of backward, but the slightly surprising thing about that is that backward didn’t really seem to need it. The OED first attests backward as an adverb in 1330, almost two hundred years before the first attestation of backwards in 1513. Why, then, did backwards appear?**

Well, the key thing to remember here is that a language isn’t some top-down system that only creates words that there is a “logical” need for. My guess is that backwards may have appeared due to an increase in the use of non-adjectival backward that led some users to create a more clearly adverbial form based on the productive adverbial genitive rule, but looking that far back, it’s very hard to say.

Anyway, taking what we have for the back story for backward(s), what’s their current status? Mark Liberman had a well-researched profile of these words on Language Log a few months ago, and his two main conclusions were that:

American English uses a higher proportion of backward than British English

Both AmEng and BrEng use higher proportions of backwards in conversation than in formal writing

There’s one remaining point on usage, which Liberman doesn’t go into, and which I fear I can’t go much into at the moment either. Backward is both an adverb and an adjective, but backwards is arose as an adverbial genitive. So can backwards be used as an adjective too? Is (2), for instance, acceptable with the s?

(2) Jackson trained himself to say words in reverse order. His backward(s) mumbling disturbed his friends.

The OED says that this adjectival usage is obsolete, but I’m not so sure. I’ve found a couple of examples of adjectival backwards in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), such as (3). I don’t have the resources to get numbers on this, but they seem relatively rare compared to both adverbial backwards and adjectival backward.***

I don’t know how I feel about (3). I think I would accept it in speech but change it in writing, which makes some sense, since (3) comes from a play. So it seems to me that there is a preference for backward in adjectival usages, but I don’t have good data to support this. This post is running long anyway, so let me leave it there and defer to you readers. Any thoughts on backward(s) are welcome, especially on adjectival backwards.

Summary:Backwards arose as the adverbial genitive of backward 500 years ago. In contemporary English, backward appears to be more formal than backwards, and backward is used more in American English than British English.

An example where I find "backwards" superior, conveniently located just outside my office.

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*: Wikipedia has a nice article discussing the span of the genitive in English and other languages if you’re interested in the full details.

**: Let me state the caveat right now that it could just be that backwards does indeed predate adverbial backward but that data sparsity makes them seem to have been temporally swapped. But that would be unexciting.

***: I know what you’re thinking: but Gabe, everyone knows that COHA and COCA have part-of-speech tags on their words, so you could just search for backwards.[j*] to get all the adjectival backwards, and compare that count to backwards.[r*] for adverbial backwards and settle the matter immediately. The trouble is that COHA/COCA were (I think) machine-tagged, and so there is not a single case of tagged-adjectival backwards even though there are clearly adjectival backwards like in (3).

About The Blog

A lot of people make claims about what "good English" is. Much of what they say is flim-flam, and this blog aims to set the record straight. Its goal is to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn't. Somehow, this was enough to garner a favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal.

About Me

I'm Gabe Doyle, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University. Before that, I got a doctorate in linguistics from UC San Diego and a bachelor's in math from Princeton.

In my research, I look at how humans manage one of their greatest learning achievements: the acquisition of language. I build computational models of how people can learn language with cognitively-general processes and as few presuppositions as possible. Currently, I'm working on models for acquiring phonology and other constraint-based aspects of cognition.

I also examine how we can use large electronic resources, such as Twitter, to learn about how we speak to each other. Some of my recent work uses Twitter to map dialect regions in the United States.

“Summary: Backwards arose as the adverbial genitive of backward 500 years ago. In contemporary English, backward appears to be more formal than backwards, and backward is used more in American English than British English.”

I also make a usage distinction in certain cases, as noted by KevinM in the comments on the Language Log post, that ‘backward’ can mean ‘retarded in development’. (“You might find Uncle Harry a little backward, but remember that he only went up to the seventh grade in school, and has never left Lincoln County.”) But perhaps everybody doesn’t–could that be what’s going on here?

The reference to working class makes me think that the ‘ignorant/undeveloped’ sense could be in play, even with the ‘s’, which I would therefore omit in that sentence (if that’s the sense I meant. Otherwise I’m not sure what it does mean.)

KevinM’s comment also refers to a movement versus location distinction. I might pull a car backward into a space, unless I noticed that only one other car was in backwards. If a shirt or a hat is on backwards, I always use the s.
If I’m swimming backwards? probably with the s, but not as certainly–the shorter form would sound oddly formal, I think, and I might be talking about the direction I was facing (‘backwards’), as much as the direction I was going (‘backward’).

Just a few data points–I don’t think I make a shibboleth of it either way.
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I think you accidentally left out a word just after your first set of examples: “Backwards is similarly an adverbial form of backward, but the slightly surprising thing about that is that backward didn’t really seem to it.”

Is there something missing between “to” and “it,” or am I just failing to parse something? I’d appreciate a helping hand!

Dan: Don’t worry, you’re not missing an intended parse. “Need” was supposed to go in between “to” and “it”. Thanks for catching that; I’ve changed it above.

Carolyn/fornormalstepfathers: Thanks for the data points. I think my intuitions agree with yours, but I don’t have a very strong feeling on how I use the two forms. I think that it’s all a gradient difference (sometimes one sounds better or worse, but rarely is one flat-out bad), in part because I haven’t found many grammar writers complaining about their use.

Gabe,
So many of these fascinating articles have a strong component of differences between American English and English – differences in the grammar (from your examples) are often due to the different source/usage of the “English”.

I note you use “moreso” instead of “more so”. The former would hardly ever be seen in English, but does appear in American English. Perhaps you might write about that in time.

You also refer in your articles to the OED – which is the “gold standard” for English. Is there is a similar standard for American English?

This is one of those questions that if I think about I can’t come to any conclusion at all. I grew up in Oklahoma, and I believe Oklahomans use them entirely interchangeably. I can’t remember ever getting a lecture or a correction on a written paper because of this, or hearing anyone say, “Actually, you should say…”, or ever thinking someone sounded awkward for using one or the other.

I think we use/d backwards as meaning awkward or slow or naive, ‘she’s just a backwards country girl,’ but also in past tense as, ‘looked backwards’ or ‘drove the car backwards,’ and as an adverb, ‘you have that shirt on backwards.’ Especially in speaking it seems that backwards was the word we most often used, but this is the South and we tend to do somethings ba’kerds.